Mike Levin works for Connors Communications and is the mastermind behind HitTail, a tool that helps manage a site’s "long tail".

Name: Mike Levin
Aliases: miklevin, Mike-Levin.com
Single or Married: Single
Home Site: www.connors.com
Contact info: mlevin@connors.com

How did you get into SEO?

I’ve always been a fan of business guru Peter Drucker who argued that the basic mission of any company should be to get and keep customers. In fact, I internalized this message so thoroughly that whenever my job responsibilities extended to my employer’s website, I considered the basic function of the site to be that same mission. And when you think about it, that leads you directly to SEO. It’s part of the mouth of the sales funnel.

Many internal company projects that I performed dating back to 1996 could be described as SEO, and I’ve pretty much considered SEO a sub-set of whatever job I held, even though it wasn’t until Connors brought me onboard 2 years ago that I was officially in the field. Those of you who know me will probably remember me as a very active search engine forum member and moderator from about 1999 to 2001 who felt that only internal employees had enough access to the company to perform effective SEO.

What other areas do you specialize in? How do they compliment your SEO efforts?

I started out as a graphic designer, but gradually drifted away from what I considered “subjective” art fields (everyone has a favorite color) into the more hard-and-fast objective areas of marketing.

This quickly led me to Web programming, and before long I had programmed everything from order management systems to SEO-optimized content management systems. I created blogging software before Blogger, social networking software before LinkedIn, agile frameworks before Ruby on Rails, and so on. Each one of these was limited to just becoming an internal company tool to help drive sales, and never developed into anything larger. So, you might say my specialty is anticipating the next big thing and squandering the main benefit.

These projects all helped my SEO efforts by helping me drive more sales, but fell far short of their greater potential.

Any favorite projects you’d like to share?

Sure, HitTail. It’s the long tail search marketing tool that we’ve been delivering to Connors clients for a number of years. We’ve just pulled out the sexiest piece and turned it into a free service for the world.

All of us in the SEO field know that natural search is the elephant in the room of any search marketing discussion. We all know the importance of doing well in "normal" search, but that in the current environment, paid search is a much clearer deal.

Mainstream advertisers and media buyers like paid search because it’s close to regular advertising. And it doesn’t hurt that Google and Yahoo are public companies, making the paid search business quantifiable and high profile.

Yet, if the studies (and common sense) are to be believed, natural search directs 80% of the actual search traffic on the Web. That’s the elephant in the room, and that’s what HitTail is trying to address by removing most of the difficult SEO issues from the initial natural search discussion.

We plan to revolutionize the marketing industry with HitTail, similarly to how one of our previous clients, GoTo.com, created the very pay-per-click industry itself.

Mike what is your role with HitTail?

Connors and christened me Chief HitTailer, because I am the founder, lead developer, practitioner, and cheerleader. But we’ve got an excellent development team that has taken over most of the development responsibilities, turning me into more of an idea person and system architect.

Please explain the point system.

The HitTail Score is similar to PageRank, but applied to how promising a term is for natural search optimization. A 1 indicates a likely win. If you write about the topic, you have a good chance of getting a top position. A 10 means don’t bother. You’ve already secured a top position, and there’s little reason to further target the term. Anything 8 or below, we put under the suggestions tab, because our system believes it’s a good candidate for natural optimization. Score becomes more and more significant as we improve our algorithms and train HitTail. Developing Score was necessary, because otherwise it’s difficult to zero in on the best place to focus on when you pull your long keyword list. If you choose either something that’s performing to well or something that’s too obscure in the first place, you’re going to be wasting your time. The point system makes HitTailing work.

A blank score means we couldn’t calculate it, usually given a search engine that we don’t recognize, or unusual querystring parameters. HitTail tends to automatically pick up new search engines as they appear, but occasionally it’s a specialized search or some other factor that keeps us from being able to apply a score.

I noticed the name changed from "My Long Tail" to "My Hit Tail". What made this occur?

Well, we’re big fans of Guy Kawasaki here, and have aptly taken his advice to heart about naming your company as something that works as a verb. One of the biggest public relations coups of our time is the addition of the term Googling to the Mirriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary. We just can’t imagine people getting into the process of MyLongTailing. But HitTailing, we can see. You too can be a HitTailer.

What part of SEO drives you nuts?

Oh, that’s easy: the name "SEO".

It’s like trying to sell fillet mignon and calling it dead, nearly raw cow flesh. And if being an overly technical, intimidating acronym weren’t bad enough, the field is full of such diverse approaches, companies and philosophies that it can hardly be considered a single industry.

Many marketing people have a gag reaction when you mention SEO because of bad experiences. There are plenty of great SEOs out there, but it’s belied by the inconsistencies you find when researching SEO. Of course, that’s the nature of the business, because once search engines become too predictable, they have to change. What’s a company to do when they go researching how to fix their natural search problem?

SEO has a major public relations problem that’s keeping it from undergoing the same maturation as SEM, and even the next most similar profession, public relations itself. This limits how interesting SEO is to me, because at this phase in my career, I’m mostly interested in creating large-scale, profitable commodity products.

What’s your favorite part of SEO?

Definitely the performance-art aspect, and the need for the audience feedback. I could have easily ended up as a magician or artist.

In college, I tried to find this type of satisfaction in engineering, but was disheartened by long product development cycles and separation from the audience. So, I switched to graphic design, then Web development, which fixed this problem by allowing remarkably short product development cycles compared to engineering. But it was only with SEO that it all snapped in place.

Sites are stages. Their steady stream of new visitors is audience. Getting that audience meant that either a site had to be so cool as to spontaneously keep getting new links (constant good reviews), or simply have high volume natural search (word of mouth). And the performer feedback addiction is fed by constantly growing a larger head and longer tail of keyword traffic distribution–in other words, HitTailing.

Where do you see SEO going over the next 5 years?

Technology’s going to change radically, but 5 years is still speaking in the relative short term. For the next few years, being merely "good enough" and not screwing up is enough to keep people and companies from changing their habits. That’s another way of saying Google will probably remain the dominant force in search for the next 5 years, and default search will remain about 100 times more important than anything else. The decisions Google makes about what to let "creep into" default search are the most influential variables in the industry.

If any chinks in Google’s armor are going to appear, it will be from totally unexpected directions, because if it were obvious, we would already know about it today. Such examples would be "small world" crawlers that allow you to search, then watch the search results change as you sat and watched the Internet itself change in real-time. I also expect proactive chat outreach tools built into search result pages, whereby the companies that were just found will be alerted and given a chance to IM you. I see that based on what’s going on with Gmail right now.

Then of course, there’s the battle against spam. Just like the engines had fixed the problem of Open Directory Project clone spam, they’re going to have to fix the aggregation-spam problem. Ideally, engines will be able to identify the original content, then cluster and collapse all aggregators. Garbage dumped onto the Internet is being mostly caused by AdSense incentive and publisher laziness. It’s easier to re-publish someone else’s content than it is to create your own. The search engines made the situation for themselves and they’re going to have to fix it, or else leave openings for competitors who do. Not that they’ll win, but with proper funding and public relations, they will be able to fight a good fight.

Any favorite tips or advice?

Yes, focus on the long tail of search using blogging software as your CMS system, and choosing exactly the right topics. Blogging software spares you most of the SEO pains, and the less-competitive long tail keywords are where you can make progress most quickly. But if you focus on the wrong keywords in the long tail, you’re wasting your time. Either you’re choosing words that you’re already doing well on, and don’t need further optimization. Or you’re choosing terms that there will never be any further search traffic on.

The craft of long tail marketing is choosing low hanging fruit, expanding your website using those keywords, and thereby generating more low hanging fruit. Of course, your writing must be a real contribution to the Internet, and not just more garbage. Over time, this strategy causes the natural traffic generated by your site to snowball. The healthiest sites have the biggest head and the longest tail. Anyone can HitTail.

For the more advanced crowd, I’d say pay attention to how the principles of modern programming are being applied to the Web. Everything will change in a few years as the Web becomes a truly viable programming platform and practices such as object oriented programming and separation of concerns can truly be applied to the Web. Microsoft’s .NET was an early attempt, and the new breed of browser-based OSes like youOS are the latest. When you look at Microsoft’s Live site, you’ll see that their search tool has a slider instead of paging links, which will wreak havoc on analytics software, as will the Ajax programming technique. All this will have a delayed impact on SEO, because Google, Yahoo and MSN have a vested interest in keeping everyone’s analytics software working correctly. But given enough time, and the additional factors of mobile, the impending $100 laptop and other factors, the very game is going to be unrecognizable in maybe 10 years. So, don’t go building castles on clouds.

How has SEO benefited you the most?

SEO has benefited me the most by getting me involved in a part of marketing that’s positioned to become the next big thing. I would never be working as the vice president of a public relations company in New York City if I kept on the graphic design or web development paths. SEO opens doors, because embedded somewhere in it is the Holy Grail of marketing. There’s a lot of business for people who can actually deliver.

Do you take jobs or just work privately?

We take jobs. The free HitTail service is our overture to the world, saying here’s a PR firm that not only gets it, but is defining it. We’re working to fill in one SEO client in each major industry, and we’ve got some openings. You might say, HitTail is becoming something of a job finding factory, so we can rep the most promising companies in each industry that we identify as something we’d like to do. So, we effectively developed an SEO tool to help us optimize our PR business. All phone-calls and emails are welcome.

What industries do you work in?

It’s fairly open. Connors Communications likes to find and create category killers. We’re the PR firm that launched Amazon.com and Priceline.com. We’re doing SEO in some of the most competitive spaces, including hotels and automotive. We’ve just added the shipping industry, and we’ve got a number of niche technology start-ups. We’re looking to add some other major industries where we don’t have conflict yet, like pharmaceutical and video games. And we always want to hear from new tech startups with socially transforming stuff, like hydrogen cells, manufactured diamonds, nanotech, and the like.

What is your SEO Philosophy?

Well, it derives from a statement I heard from Craig Silverstein of Google, that Google’s mission is not search relevancy. It’s making its users happy. This shows how radically the field of search COULD change, and SEO must always assume a "ready position". It’s like in martial arts, the posture from which you can deal with any situation most quickly. So while we do the standard SEO stuff, like audits, recommendation documents, and a series of "fixes" on existing websites, we revel in our "big guns" approach–approaches that we rarely observe our counterparts in the SEO profession using.

Specifically, we can connect to almost any content management system and effectively end-run their presentation layer. This means, we can output perfectly optimized websites using the search formula du jour, and keep pace with any little change that may come down the road. The data transformations that occur in this process give us an opportunity to create RSS feeds where there were none before, install difficult-to-generate SEO devices like prev/next arrows and breadcrumb trails where there were none before, and even generate mobile-friendly versions of the website, and such. It’s all based on a series of complex and artistic queries.

Basically, we can weave and knit perfectly organized websites together from the raw data and perfectly match the look, feel & functionality of the original broken site, thereby picking up lots of short-term traffic that should have been going to the client in the first place. This buys lots of time for the larger discussions to take place about the fundamental infrastructure fix. But some clients just end up going with our XSL transformation version of the site as their permanent solution. By the way, this all has nothing to do with HitTail, except for the fact that they’re coming from the same company.

Anything else?

Just that we look forward to seeing everyone sign up, that we’ve started a forum for the HitTail community to communicate with each other.